the State, which is almost a commonplace of German thought. In English
and American writings the State is almost always used to denote society
in its more organized aspects, or it may be identified with government
as a special agency operating for the collective interests of men in
association. But in German literature society is a technical term and
means something empirical and, so to speak, external; while the State,
if not avowedly something mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral
entity, the creation of self-conscious reason operating in behalf of the
spiritual and ideal interests of its members. Its function is cultural,
educative. Even when it intervenes in material interests, as it does in
regulating lawsuits, poor laws, protective tariffs, etc., etc., its
action has ultimately an ethical significance: its purpose is the
furthering of an ideal community. The same thing is to be said of wars
when they are really national wars, and not merely dynastic or
accidental.
Society is an expression of man's egoistic nature; his natural seeking
for personal advantage and profit. Its typical manifestation is in
competitive economic struggle and in the struggle for honor and
recognized social status. These have their proper place; but with
respect even to them it is the duty of the State to intervene so that
the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which alone are universal.
Hence the significance of the force or power of the State. Unlike other
forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for it represents force
consecrated to the assertion and expansion of final goods which are
spiritual, moral, rational. These absolute ends can be maintained only
in struggle against man's individualistic ends. Conquest through
conflict is the law of morals everywhere.
In Kant we find only the beginnings of this political philosophy. He is
still held back by the individualism of the eighteenth century.
Everything legal and political is conceived by him as external and hence
outside the strictly moral realm of inner motivation. Yet he is not
content to leave the State and its law as a wholly unmoral matter. The
_natural_ motives of man are, according to Kant (evidently following
Hobbes), love of power, love of gain, love of glory. These motives are
egoistic; they issue in strife--in the war of all against all. While
such a state of affairs does not and cannot invade the inner realm of
duty, the realm of the moral motive, it evidently presents a regime in
which the conquest of the world of sense by the law of reason cannot be
effected. Man in his rational or universal capacity must, therefore,
will an outward order of harmony in which it is at least possible for
acts dictated by rational freedom to get a footing. Such an outer order
is the State. Its province is not to promote moral freedom
directly--only the moral will can do that. But its business is to hinder
the hindrances to freedom: to establish a social condition of outward
order in which truly moral acts may gradually evolve a kingdom of
humanity. Thus while the State does not have a directly moral scope of
action (since the coercion of motive is a moral absurdity), it does have
a moral basis and an ultimate moral function.
It is the law of reason, "holy and inviolable," which impels man to the
institution of the State, not natural sociability, much less
considerations of expediency. And so necessary is the State to
humanity's realization of its moral purpose that there can be no right
of revolution. The overthrow and execution of the sovereign (Kant
evidently had the French Revolution and Louis XVI in mind) is "an
immortal and inexpiable sin like the sin against the Holy Ghost spoken
of by theologians, which can never be forgiven in this world or in the
next."
Kant was enough of a child of the eighteenth century to be cosmopolitan,
not nationalistic, in his feeling. Since humanity as a whole, in its
universality, alone truly corresponds to the universality of reason, he
upheld the ideal of an ultimate republican federation of states; he was
one of the first to proclaim the possibility of enduring peace among
nations on the basis of such a federated union of mankind.
The threatened domination of Europe by Napoleon following on the wars
waged by republican France put an end, however, to cosmopolitanism.
Since Germany was the greatest sufferer from these wars, and since it
was obvious that the lack of national unity, the division of Germany
into a multitude of petty states, was the great source of her weakness;
since it was equally obvious that Prussia, the one strong and
centralized power among the German states, was the only thing which
saved them all from national extinction, subsequent political philosophy
in Germany rescued the idea of the State from the somewhat ambiguous
moral position in which Kant had left it. Since a state which is an
absolute moral necessity and whose actions are nevertheless lacking in
inherent moral quality is an anomaly, the doctrine almost calls for a
theory which shall make the State the supreme moral entity.
Fichte marks the beginning of the transformation; and, in his writings,
it is easy to detect a marked difference of attitude toward the
nationalistic state before and after 1806, when in the battle of Jena
Germany went down to inglorious defeat. From the time of Fichte, the
German philosophy of the State blends with its philosophy of history, so
that my reservation of the latter topic for the next section is somewhat
arbitrary, and I shall not try rigidly to maintain the division of
themes.
I have already mentioned the fact that Kant relaxes the separation of
the moral realm of freedom from the sensuous realm of nature
sufficiently to assert that the former is _meant_ to influence the
latter and finally to subjugate it. By means of the little crack thus
introduced into nature, Fichte rewrites the Kantian philosophy. The
world of sense must be regarded from the very start as material which
the free, rational, moral Ego has created in order to have material for
its own adequate realization of will. Fichte had a longing for an
absolute unity which did not afflict Kant, to whom, save for the
concession just referred to, a complete separation of the two operations
of legislative reason sufficed. Fichte was also an ardently _active_
soul, whose very temperament assured him of the subordination of
theoretical knowledge to moral action.
It would be as difficult to give, in short space, an adequate sketch of
Fichte's philosophy as of Kant's. To him, however, reason was the
expression of the will, not (as with Kant) the will an application of
reason to action. "_Im Anfang war die That_" is good Fichteanism. While
Kant continued the usual significance of the term Reason (with only such
modifications as the rationalism of his century had made current),
Fichte began the transformation which consummated in later German
idealism. If the world of nature and of human relations is an expression
of reason, then reason must be the sort of thing, and have the sort of
attributes by means of which the world may be construed, no matter how
far away this conception of reason takes us from the usual meaning of
the term. To Fichte the formula which best described such aspects of the
world and of life as he was interested in was effort at self-realization
through struggle with difficulties and overcoming opposition. Hence his
formula for reason was a Will which, having "posited" itself, then
"posited" its antithesis in order, through further action subjugating
this opposite, to conquer its own freedom.
The doctrine of the primacy of the Deed, and of the Duty to achieve
freedom through moral self-assertion against obstacles (which, after
all, are there only to further this self-assertion) was one which could,
with more or less plausibility, be derived from Kant. More to our
present point, it was a doctrine which could be preached with noble
moral fervor in connection with the difficulties and needs of a divided
and conquered Germany. Fichte saw himself as the continuator of the work
of Luther and Kant. His final "science of knowledge" brought the German
people alone of the peoples of the world into the possession of the idea
and ideal of absolute freedom. Hence the peculiar destiny of the German
scholar and the German State. It was the duty and mission of German
science and philosophy to contribute to the cause of the spiritual
emancipation of humanity. Kant had already taught that the acts of men
were to become gradually permeated by a spirit of rationality till there
should be an equation of inner freedom of mind and outer freedom of
action. Fichte's doctrine demanded an acceleration of the process. Men
who have attained to a consciousness of the absolute freedom and
self-activity must necessarily desire to see around them similar free
beings. The scholar who is truly a scholar not merely knows, but he
knows the nature of knowledge--its place and function as a manifestation
of the Absolute. Hence he is, in a peculiar sense, the direct
manifestation of God in the world--the true priest. And his priestly
function consists in bringing other men to recognize moral freedom in
its creative operation. Such is the dignity of education as conducted by
those who have attained true philosophic insight.
Fichte made a specific application of this idea to his own country and
time. The humiliating condition of contemporary Germany was due to the
prevalence of egoism, selfishness and particularism: to the fact that
men had lowered themselves to the plane of sensuous life. The fall was
the worse because the Germans, more than any other people, were by
nature and history conscious of the ideal and spiritual principle, the
principle of freedom, lying at the very basis of all things. The key to
the political regeneration of Germany was to be found in a moral and
spiritual regeneration effected by means of education. The key, amid
political division, to political unity was to be sought in devotion to
moral unity. In this spirit Fichte preached his "Addresses to the
German Nation." In this spirit he collaborated in the foundation of the
University of Berlin, and zealously promoted all the educational reforms
introduced by Stein and Humboldt into Prussian life.
The conception of the State as an essential moral Being charged with an
indispensable moral function lay close to these ideas. Education is
_the_ means of the advancement of humanity toward realization of its
divine perfection. Education is the work of the State. The syllogism
completes itself. But in order that the State may carry on its
educational or moral mission it must not only possess organization and
commensurate power, but it must also control the conditions which secure
the possibility offered to the individuals composing it. To adopt
Aristotle's phrase, men must live before they can live nobly. The
primary condition of a secure life is that everyone be able to live by
his own labor. Without this, moral self-determination is a mockery. The
business of the State, outside of its educational mission, is concerned
with property, and this business means insuring property to everyone as
well as protecting him in what he already possesses. Moreover, property
is not mere physical possession. It has a profound moral significance,
for it means the subjugation of physical things to will. It is a
necessary part of the realization of moral personality: the conquest of
the non-ego by the ego. Since property does not mean mere appropriation,
but is a right recognized and validated by society itself, property has
a social basis and aim. It is an expression not of individual egotism
but of the universal will. Hence it is essential to the very idea of
property and of the State that all the members of society have an equal
opportunity for property. Hence it is the duty of the State to secure to
its every member the right to work and the reward of his work.
The outcome, as expressed in his essay on "The Closed Industrial State,"
is State Socialism, based on moral and idealistic grounds, not on
economic considerations. In order that men may have a real opportunity
to develop their moral personalities, their right to labor and to
adequate living, in return for their labor must be assured. This cannot
happen in a competitive society. Industry must be completely regulated
by the State if these indispensable rights to labor and resulting
comfort and security of life as means to moral volition are to be
achieved. But a state engaged in unrestricted foreign trade will leave
its workingmen at the mercy of foreign conditions. It must therefore
regulate or even eliminate foreign commerce so far as is necessary to
secure its own citizens. The ultimate goal is a universal state as wide
as humanity, and a state in which each individual will act freely,
without state-secured rights and state-imposed obligations. But before
this cosmopolitan and philosophically anarchic condition can be reached,
we must pass through a period of the nationalistic closed state. Thus at
the end a wide gulf separates Fichte from Kant. The moral individualism
of the latter has become an ethical socialism. Only in and by means of a
circle of egos or personalities does a human being attain the moral
reason and freedom which Kant bestowed upon him as his birthright. Only
through the educational activities of the State and its complete
regulation of the industrial activities of its members does the
potential moral freedom of individuals become an established reality.
If I have devoted so much space to Fichte it is not because of his
direct influence upon affairs or even upon thought. He did not found a
school. His system was at once too personal and too formal.
Nevertheless, he expressed ideas which, removed from their special
context in his system, were taken up into the thought of cultivated
Germany. Heine, speaking of the vogue of systems of thought, says with
profound truth that "nations have an instinctive presentiment of what
they require to fulfill their mission."
And Fichte's thought infiltrated through many crevices. Rodbertus and
Lasalle, the socialists, were, for example, profoundly affected by him.
When the latter was prosecuted in a criminal suit for his "Programme of
Workingmen," his reply was that his programme was a distinctively
philosophic utterance, and hence protected by the constitutional
provision for freedom of science and its teaching. And this is his
philosophy of the State:
"The State is the unity and cooperation of individuals in a
moral whole. . . . The ultimate and intrinsic end of the State
is, therefore, to further the positive unfolding, the
progressive development of human life. Its function is to work
out the true end of man; that is to say, the full degree of
culture of which human nature is capable."
And he quotes with approval the words:
"The concept of the State must be broadened so as to make the
State the contrivance whereby all human virtue is to be
realized to the full."
And if he differs from Fichte, it is but in the assertion that since the
laboring class is the one to whom the need most directly appeals, it is
workingmen who must take the lead in the development of the true
functions of the State.
Pantheism is a philosophic nickname which should be sparingly employed;
so also should the term Monism. To call Fichte's system an ethical
pantheism and monism is not to say much that is enlightening. But with
free interpretation the designation may be highly significant in
reference to the spiritual temper of the Germany of the first part of
the nineteenth century. For it gives a key to the presentiment of what
Germany needed to fulfill its mission.
It is a commonplace of German historians that its unity and expansion to
a great state powerful externally, prosperous internally, was wrought,
unlike that of any other people, from within outward. In Lange's words,
"our national development started from the most ideal and approximated
more and more to the real." Hegel and Heine agree that in Germany the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic career were paralleled by a
philosophic revolution and an intellectual empire. You recall the bitter
word that, when Napoleon was finally conquered and Europe partitioned,
to Germany was assigned the kingdom of the clouds. But this aerial and
tenuous kingdom became a mighty power, working with and in the statesmen
of Prussia and the scholars of Germany to found a kingdom on the solid
earth. Spiritual and ideal Germany made common cause with realistic and
practical Prussia. As says Von Sybel, the historian of the "Founding of
the German Empire":
"Germany had been ruined through its own disintegration and
had dragged Prussia with it into the abyss. It was well known
that the wild fancies of the Conqueror hovered about the utter
annihilation of Prussia; if this should take place, then east
as well as west of the Elbe, not only political independence,
but every trace of a German spirit, the German language and
customs, German art and learning--everything would be wiped
out by the foreigners. But this fatal danger was perceived
just at the time when everybody had been looking up to Kant
and Schiller, had been admiring Faust, the world-embracing
masterpiece of Goethe's, and had recognized that Alexander von
Humboldt's cosmological studies and Niebuhr's "Roman History"
had created a new era in European science and learning. In
such intellectual attainments the Germans felt that they were
far superior to the vanquisher of the world and his great
nation; and so the political interests of Prussia and the
salvation of the German nationality exactly coincided.
Schleiermacher's patriotic sermons, Fichte's stirring
addresses to the German people, Humboldt's glorious founding
of the Berlin University, served to augment the resisting
power of Prussia, while Scharnhorst's recruits and militia
were devoted to the defense of German honor and German
customs. Everyone felt that German nationality was lost if
Prussia did not come to its rescue, and that, too, there was
no safety possible for Prussia unless all Germany was free.
"What a remarkable providence it was that brought together, as
in the Middle Ages, on this ancient colonial ground, a throng
of the most energetic men from all districts of Germany. For
neither Stein nor his follower, Hardenberg, nor the generals
Scharnhorst, Bluecher and Gneisenau, nor the authors, Niebuhr,
Fichte and K. F. Eichorn, nor many others who might be
mentioned, were born in Prussia; yet because their thoughts
centered in Germany, they had become loyal Prussians. The name
Germany had been blotted from the political map of Europe, but
never had so many hearts thrilled at the thought of being
German.
"Thus on the most eastern frontier of German life, in the
midst of troubles which seemed hopeless, the idea of German
unity, which had lain dormant for centuries, now sprang up in
a new birth. At first this idea was held exclusively by the
great men of the times and remained the invaluable possession
of the cultivated classes; but once started it spread far and
wide among the younger generation. . . . But it was easier to
defeat the mighty Napoleon than to bend the German sentiments
of dualism and individualism to the spirit of national unity."
What I have called the ethical pantheism and monistic idealism of Fichte
(a type of philosophy reigning almost unchallenged in Germany till
almost the middle of the century) was an effective weapon in fighting
and winning this more difficult battle. In his volume on the "Romantic
School in Germany," Brandes quotes from the diary of Hoffman a passage
written in 1809.
"Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th, I imagine
myself looking at my own Ego through a kaleidoscope. All the
forms moving around me are Egos and annoy me by what they do
and leave undone."
It is a temptation to find in this passage a symbol both of German
philosophy and of the temper of Germany at the time. Its outer defeats,
its weakness in the world of action, had developed an exasperated
introspection. This outer weakness, coinciding, as Von Sybel points out,
with the bloom of Germany in art, philosophy, history, philology and
philosophy, made the Ego of Germany the noblest contemporary object of
contemplation, yet one surrounded with other national Egos who offended
by what they did and what they did not do. Patriotism, national feeling,
national consciousness are common enough facts. But nowhere save in
Germany, in the earlier nineteenth century, have these sentiments and
impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture into a mystic cult. This
was the time when the idea of the _Volks-seele_, the _Volks-geist_, was
born; and the idea lost no time in becoming a fact. Not merely poetry
was affected by it, but philology, history and jurisprudence. The
so-called historic school is its offspring. The science of social
psychology derives from it at one remove. The soul, however, needed a
body, and (quite in accord with German idealism) it formed a body for
itself--the German State as a unified Empire.
While the idealistic period came first, it is important to bear in mind
the kind of idealism it was. At this point the pantheistic allusion
becomes significant. The idealism in question was not an idealism of
another world but of _this_ world, and especially of the State. The
embodiment of the divine and absolute will and ideal is the existing
world of nature and of men. Especially is the human ego the authorized
and creative agent of absolute purpose. The significance of German
philosophy was precisely to make men aware of their nature and destiny
as the direct and active representatives of absolute and creative
purpose.
If I again quote Heine, it is because, with his contempt for technical
philosophy, he had an intimate sense of its human meaning. Of German
pantheistic idealism, he wrote in 1833 while it was still in its prime:
"God is identical with the world. . . . But he manifests
himself most gloriously in man, who feels and thinks at
the same time, who is capable of distinguishing his own
individuality from objective nature, whose intellect
already bears within itself the ideas that present themselves
to him in the phenomenal world. In man Deity reaches
self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness God again
reveals through man. But this revelation does not take place
in and through individual man, but in and through collective
humanity . . . which comprehends and represents in idea and in
reality the whole God-universe. . . . It is an error to suppose
that this religion leads men to indifference. On the contrary,
the consciousness of his divinity will inspire man with
enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this moment the
really noble achievements of true heroism glorify the earth."
In one respect, Heine was a false prophet. He thought that this
philosophy would in the end accrue to the profit of the radical, the
republican and revolutionary party in Germany. The history of German
liberalism is a complicated matter. Suffice it in general to say that
the honey the libertarians hived was appropriated in the end by the
party of authority. In Heine's assurance that these ideas would in due
time issue in action he was profoundly right. His essay closes with
burning words, from which I extract the following: